“Thank you, ma’am.  Now how did I know?  Why,” he chuckled, “I saw a big B on your hand-bag, and I knew you was from the hospital-ship—­they told me that at the Stay Awhile; and the rest was easy, ma’am.  I had a mate along o’ your barge.  He was one of them the Boers got at Talana Hill.  They chipped his head-piece nicely—­just like the 4.7’s flay the kopjes up there.  My mate’s been writing to me about you.  We’re a long way from home, Joey and me, and a bit o’ kindness is a bit of all right to us.”

“Where is your home?” Jasmine asked, her fatigue and oppression lifting.

He chuckled as though it were a joke, while he answered:  “Australia onct and first.  My mate, Joey Clynes, him that’s on your ship, we was both born up beyond Bendigo.  When we cut loose from the paternal leash, so to speak, we had a bit of boundary-riding, rabbit-killing, shearing and sun-downing—­all no good, year by year.  Then we had a bit o’ luck and found a mob of warrigals—­horses run wild, you know.  We stalked ’em for days in the droughttime to a water-course, and got ’em, and coaxed ’em along till the floods come; then we sold ’em, and with the hard tin shipped for to see the world.  So it was as of old.  And by and by we found ourselves down here, same as all the rest, puttin’ in a bit o’ time for the Flag.”

Jasmine turned on him one of those smiles which had made her so many friends in the past—­a smile none the less alluring because it had lost that erstime flavour of artifice and lure which, however hidden, had been part of its power.  Now it was accompanied by no slight drooping of the eyelids.  It brightened a look which was direct and natural.

“It’s a good thing to have lived in the wide distant spaces of the world,” she responded.  “A man couldn’t easily be mean or small where life is so simple and so large.”

His face flushed with pleasure.  She was so easy to get on with, he said to himself; and she certainly had a wonderfully kind smile.  But he felt too that she needed greater wisdom, and he was ready to give it—­a friendly characteristic of the big open spaces “where life is so simple and so large.”

“Well, that might be so ‘long o’ some continents,” he remarked, “but it wasn’t so where Joey Clynes and me was nourished, so to speak.  I tripped up on a good many mean things from Bendigo to Thargomindah and back around.  The back-blocks has its tricks as well as the towns, as you would see if you come across a stock-rider with a cheque to be broke in his hand.  I’ve seen six months’ wages go bung in a day with a stock-rider on the gentle jupe.  But again, peradventure, I’ve seen a man that had lost ten thousand sheep tramp fifty miles in a blazing sun with a basket of lambs on his back, savin’ them two switherin’ little papillions worth nothin’ at all, at the risk of his own life—­just as mates have done here on this salamanderin’ veld; same as Colonel Byng did to-day along o’ Wortmann’s Drift.”